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Read All Over celebrates the bookworm in all of us, showcasing readers in Vancouver and the books they love most. |
| Cynara Geissler has a chapbook of poetry called Small, Stunted Ways (Hur Publishing, 2012). Her poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in a number of print and online publications including subTerrain, Event, Geez, and Shameless. |
| She’s the marketing manager at Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver, and she gets a little nervous whenever she finds herself in a home without bookshelves or some form of television. (She cannot read Dwell for this reason). |
What are you currently reading?
I usually have about as many books going as I have open Firefox tabs (I can never tell where the music is coming from!). I'm extra nostalgic in July/August for summer holidays lost, so I'm re-reading a bunch of favourites from when I was a teenager. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky absolutely holds up and I think it is quite possibly the most ingenious YA/epistolary novel of all time (sorry, Samuel Richardson). I am not nearly as keen on The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as I was at 13 (a lot of stuff is, in a word, PROBLEMATIC), but it makes me appreciate (most) of the choices made by the brilliant BBC television adaptation Sherlock that much more. I’ve also just started How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. I think it might be the HBO’s Girls of novels for the 29-39 demographic.
How do you like your books served up best - audio books, graphic novels, used paperbacks, library loaner, e-reader...?
I prefer novels and visual non-fiction as physical books. I buy new as much as I can afford (and as much as I can store without going too far into books-as-furniture or Hoarders territory). It’s important to me to shop at the remaining bookstores in Vancouver; the experience of browsing well-curated bookshelves in-person--encountering books “in the wild”--cannot be replicated online.
I use my phone as an e-reader and tend to buy essays and story collections in ebook form--I like that I can read a story or essay on my transit commutes. Actually, I think I read more books in total since getting my iPhone. I’m now rarely in a position where I finish a book without being able to start a new one right away.
What books have influenced your life the most?
The writers I read while completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Winnipeg occupy a lot of permanent real estate in my brain. I was exposed to so many mind-blowing books and critics during my time there: Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Marjane Sartrapi’s Persepolis were especially significant. In the early noughts you were hard-pressed to find any comics--maybe aside from Maus--being taught or written about in academia, so I was in HEAVEN.
I like to imagine that John Fiske, Judith Butler, Karl Marx, and Gayatri Spivak--theorists I loved studying--are now my tough theoretical posse, snapping their fingers all West Side Story-style in my mind. I’m sure U of W will want to put that on a promotional brochure for their Honours English program.
Favourite Vancouver/Lower Mainland writer?
I have a crush on every author.
The one book you always recommend is...
I can never recommend just one. If you asked me to curate my own Greatest Literary Hits Library it would invariably include books by Kimmy Beach, Lorna Crozier, Catherine Hunter, Chandra Mayor, Alan Moore, Drew Hayden Taylor, Miriam Toews, J.D. Salinger, and George Saunders. (I’m going to read this later and kick myself for leaving somebody out).
What book or story impressed you as a child? Were you obsessed with any particular ones?
My prized possession as a little kid (say K-2) was a complete set of animal encyclopedias called Getting to know... Nature’s Children. They were double-sided and reversible, i.e. “Rabbits” would be on one side, “Deer” on the other. If I recall correctly the animal pairings were “safe”--I don’t think they put animals that might prey on each other in the same book. But I could be wrong. (I’m now imagining the series editors having intense editorial meetings around the animal pairings: "Ok, which of you wise guys thought we should put the mongoose with the python? The book is going to eat itself!")
I was also mad for magazines like Disney Adventures (sadly now defunct!), Owl, Highlights and Ranger Rick. A friend reminded me that one of them--Ranger Rick, I believe-- had a collectible animal pull-out poster (you know, the way Tiger Beat has a centrefold of a teen heart throb). When I was 7 or so I remember hanging a particularly dreamy Arctic Fox poster above my bed. I’m sure it came from Ranger Rick!
When I aged out of those mags I read Cracked and Seventeen. A lot of my born-in-the-80s lady friends (myself included) loved the “Ben’s Life” column in Seventeen where “Ben” dished about his relationship with Eliza. (I recently read online that the column was entirely fictional--my inner twelve-year-old was livid at this betrayal).
In terms of fiction, I really loved to read series: Choose Your Own Adventure, The Baby-Sitters Club (especially the special Mystery and Super Mystery editions), Girl Talk (a series about highschool-aged girls set in the fictional town of Acorn Falls, Minnesota--I considered Minnesota basically a stand-in for Manitoba since one of the girls played hockey), Sweet Valley High, Star Wars novelizations. Horror series like Christopher Pike’s The Last Vampire and R.L. Stine’s Fear Street were passed around under desks like test-answer cheat sheets. There was one day where half a dozen kids in my class (myself included) got “salle d’étude” (aka detention) for sneak-reading horror books under our desks during a particularly dull repeate lecture on the fur trade.
What's next on your reading list?
Thanks to Canadian Poets Petting Cats I’ve just learned about and ordered Sherwin Tija’s graphic novel/fiction/gamebook parody: You Are a Cat!. It can’t get here soon enough. I also snagged a copy of Anakana Schofield’s debut novel Malarky. I can’t wait to read it. Everyone I know is raving about it.
Your life story is published tomorrow. What's the title??
Titling your own life might be impossible (this is why we have things like publishers and editors and publicists!). I’ve consulted a friend and we’ve narrowed it down to three:
Impostor
A Bowl of Gravy
Probably Not a Furry
You can follow Cynara's musings on Twitter and tumblr.
